The Colonial Colleges in America

One of the gifts of the Great Awakening to British North America was the founding of new colleges: Princeton, Rhode Island College, which became Brown University; Queen’s College, founded by Dutch sympathizers with the Awakening in New Jersey; and Dartmouth College, which began as a missionary school for Indians, but it was moved by its founder to New Hampshire. These were only the colleges most directly nurtured by the awakening. Two others: the College of Philadelphia and King’s College in New York City, which was renamed Columbia after the American Revolution; also in varying degrees bore the footprint of the Awakening.

The College of Philadelphia was organized as an academy in a meeting hall in Philadelphia originally built to accommodate that grand itinerant George Whitefield on his many preaching tours. The academy organizers quickly ensured that both the academy and the college that superseded it were kept safe from Whitefield’s evangelical enthusiasm. And King’s College, which opened its doors in 1754, was deliberately designed to draw enthusiasm for the Church of England, which was struggling for representatives in the colonies. Its first president, Samuel Johnson, had actually been one of the Yale apostates from Congregationalism back in 1722.

Whitefield and the Colleges

That the Awakeners were interested in founding colleges at all may seem unusual, given the cold shoulder that Harvard and then Yale turned to the Great Awakening. George Whitefield had visited Harvard during his first great preaching tour in New England in 1740, and he found Harvard “scarcely as big as one of our least colleges at Oxford”. After all, Harvard had only one president, four tutors and about one hundred students. But worst still, “it was not far superior to our universities in piety”. This is a judgement that Whitefield did not intend as a compliment. “At Harvard, bad books are becoming fashionable among the tutors and students”.

When Whitefield journals were published, Harvard’s old-like president, Edward Holyoke, was not amused, and in December 1744, Holyoke and the Harvard faculty went to publish “The Testimony of Harvard College Against George Whitefield”, accusing Whitefield of enthusiasm and delusive management of the money he had been raising for his orphanage, and just accusing him of a general spirit of anti-intellectualism.

None of this gave Whitefield much pause because the “new-lights”, like their pious counterparts in England, Germany and in Netherlands; had an entirely different notion of how human psychology worked. The Enlightenment’s glorification of reason and nature was all well and good, argued the pious, but only when we don’t forget the limits placed upon the operation of reason by the countervailing power of the other faculties, specially the will. The celebrated German pietist, August Hermann Francke, confesses that as a theology student in Lutheran Germany, he had originally understood Christianity only in “my reason and in my thought”, it wasn’t until he had experienced repentance that “all sadness and unrest of my heart was taken all at once and I was immediately overwhelmed by a stream of joy, and gave praise to whom had shown so great grace.”

This is not necessarily an anti-intellectual stance. It was, in fact, little more than an updating of scholastic-style voluntarism. And it was shared, without any dimming of intellectual energy, by Blaise Pascal, John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards. But it could easily sound anti-intellectual. Nor was Whitefield, as an Oxford graduate, an intellectual slouch; but when he warned Holyoke that “learning without piety will only render you more capable of promoting the kingdom of the devil”, Whitefield was leaving the Awakening open to abuse, as much as Harvard’s embrace of reason had left it vulnerable to the blandishments of religion.

The Awakening in Yale

The dimensions of that abuse showed up not at Harvard, but in Yale, in 1741. Thomas Clap had taken over as rector of Yale in April of 1740. He was determined to overhaul the students and the curriculum to move Yale from a good state to a perfect one. And mistaking Whitefield with a vehicle for accomplishing that, Clap unwisely invited Whitefield to preach to the students on 1740. Whitefield was even less impressed by Yale than he had been by Harvard. “It has one rector, three tutors and about one hundred students, and with no remarkable concern among them concerning religion”.

But in Yale’s case, things did not stay that way. Over the next three months, the spiritual life of Yale College was quickened. The students in general became serious, Jonathan Edwards recorded, much engaged in the concerns of their eternal welfare. But they also became tumultuous and rebellious against what Whitefield had darkly described as an unconverted ministry.

James Davenport, a Yale graduate of 1732 and then Whitefield wannabe, showed up in Connecticut claiming direct inspiration from God and sponsoring a bonfire of books, principally on divinity. While the books where in the flames, Davenport cried out “thus the souls of the authors of those books, those of them who are dead are rusting in the flames of hell; the fate of those surviving will be the same unless speedy repentance prevent it.”

Clap tried to appease the uproar by inviting Jonathan Edwards to deliver the commencement address. But by the beginning of the next school year in September of 1741, the trustees of Yale were forced to pass a resolution threatening that “any student at this college who directly or indirectly says that the rector, either the trustees or tutors are hypocrites or unconverted men, he shall for the first offence make a public confession in the hall; and for the second offence be expelled.

And to show just how much they meant it, when a junior student, David Brainerd, snorted that one of the tutors had no more grace than a chair, rector Clap expelled him. If Clap thought he was serving an example, he was wrong. Brainerd left Yale to become a missionary to the Indians. He left in Edwards’ hands his melodramatic diary, which Edwards later published as a memorial to Brainerd’s integrity and Yale’s stinginess of heart. Brainerd’s journal went on to become one of the great religious best-sellers of the next century.

The Founding of Princeton and the Arrival of Witherspoon

Given this kind of reception, no one could be surprised if the awakeners decided to take their interests elsewhere, and begin the string of colleges that I mentioned at the beginning. But again, the result turned out to be a very mixed bag. This is because colleges founded around a valorization of the will, rather than the intellect, had a hard time justifying their existence. Usually either they disappear when the will grows weary, or allow themselves to be transformed into holes of reason just like the others, simply to justify their existence.

The College of New Jersey, Princeton, became something of a marker of how difficult it was to sustain the will for revival within the tight structure of 18th century college education. Founded through the initiative of Whitefield’s Presbyterian admirers, Jonathan Dickinson and Aaron Burr. the new college was generally perceived as a statement of protest by New Lights against Yale’s treatment of David Brainerd. If it had not been for the treatment received by Mr. Brainerd at Yale, Aaron Burr remarked, New Jersey College would never have been erected.

On the other hand, the college had trouble trying to keep going the same way that Brainerd did. The first of the presidents of the college of New Jersey, Jonathan Dickinson, was a Yale graduate class of 1706, who had been minister to a community of New England migrants in Elizabeth town, New Jersey. Within a year of founding the college, Dickinson was dead. So, leadership of the college was transferred to Aaron Burr, who’s principle credential for the job was that he happened to be Jonathan Edwards’ son-in-law. Burr moved the college in 1733 to land contributed to the college trustees by the town fathers of the village of Princeton. It delighted Esther Edwards Burr, the wife of Aaron Burr, to find a considerable awakening in the college. By February of 1757 it looked to her exactly like God’s descending into the temple in a cloud of glory. But Aaron Burr died of malaria that fall, and when the trustees brought Jonathan Edwards to Princeton as his son-in-law successor, Edwards died as well.

For the next decade, election as president of Princeton came increasingly to look like the kiss of death. Samuel Davies succeeded Edwards but collapsed and died on the strain of the work in February 1761. Davies was followed by Samuel Finley, who actually survived for five years in office before death removed him too in July of 1766. By this point, the fires of controversy over the Great Awakening had cooled considerably, and in 1758, the quarreling factions among the Presbyterians had worked a reconciliation, which they hoped to crown by recruiting as the next president of Princeton a Presbyterian, who, if not exactly the first choice of anyone, was at least the least objectionable choice in everyone’s mind: John Witherspoon. He was neither identified with the pro-awakening or anti-awakening factions, largely because he was a Scotsman and never been in America.

The arrival of John Witherspoon in Princeton in 1768 has always been regarded as something of a watershed in American intellectual life. And with good reason. For one thing, he actually lived long enough in Princeton, until 1794, to make a difference as the college’s president. Long enough, in fact, to serve in the continental congress as one of New Jersey’s representatives, and to sign the Declaration of Independence, the only clergyman to do so. For another thing, Witherspoon was successful in making moderation into an aggressive quality rather than just an exercise in appeasement. Witherspoon carried with him the old-worldish sense of the Church’s place within society and the theory of the sacramental educational religion. Not the separatism, not the voluntarism, and not the wild fire conversion enthusiasm of the Awakening.

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What was the Enlightenment

Unlike wars, treatises, elections or epidemics; the Enlightenment is an intellectual event. That’s a warning sign that explanations, timelines and conflicts are going to be a lot more messy and confusing than when we are dealing with the usual stock and trade of history people: battles, kings, plagues, etc. The Enlightenment is often thought of as an 18th century event. That is only partly true. We can place at least its remote beginnings as early as 1543, when Nicholas Copernicus published his “Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies”. And the endings of the Enlightenment can be placed as late as 1850, with the defeat of Napoleon and the end of the French Revolution.

What was the Enlightenment

The Enlightenment is often thought of as being an antireligious event, overturning the credibility of Christian explanations of the universe based on the Bible with scientific ones based on careful observation and experimentation. This too is only partly true. What Enlightenment science challenged was the principle of automatic authority: whether was the authority of the Bible, of Aristotle or of logic itself. A good deal of the Enlightenment was composed of clergymen and other religious thinkers who had no trouble finding that the Bible was more or less right after all, and that Christianity was a good thing.

Maybe the most fundamental misperception of the Enlightenment is that it was a movement about skepticism and criticism. It certainly liked to maintain a fashionable flippancy toward conventional ways of thinking, but the Enlightenment was also a very optimistic movement. Its fundamental aim was not to entertain skepticism, but to banish it, and to find in science and in scientific methods a better basis for certainty and for balanced living than in Aristotle or Cicero.

We could boil the Enlightenment down to two basic attitudes. The first would be the primacy of reason: the mind is not content with simply being told that something is true. It is not even content with admitting that someone else can be exactly be proved wrong. The mind has to be shown that something is true by standards of consistency and physical evidence which satisfy one’s own reason. The alternatives to this is either:

a) a submission to dogmatic authority, which never really uncovers anything useful, it just invites someone to be clever with the words and the arrangement of terms, or:

b) skepticism, nothing can ever be known for sure.

The first of these alternatives had been the chief operating notion of European thinkers since the Middle ages. It was this notion which Copernicus began to undermine in 1543, by suggesting that the conventional Aristotelian understanding of the Solar System, which puts the Earth at the center and has the Sun and the planets revolving in circles around it, lies in error; and that the Sun is at the center of the Solar System. However, the turmoil of the great religious wars of the 1500’s and the 1600’s, as well as some severe problems within Copernicus’ own theory, kept all of this in the realm of hypothesis until the invention of the telescope and its use in 1610 by Galileo Galilei, who’s direct observation of the Moon and the planets wrecked the authority of Aristotle for good.

Ten years later, Sir Francis Bacon published his Novum Organum, which called upon his contemporaries to toss aside Aristotle and the teachers of scholastic logic, and form an acquaintance with things. The best demonstration, said Bacon, by far, is experience. It is time for people to use their reason to put together the lessons of experience into a new scheme of knowledge which describes nature, rather than putting their reason to the service of the cobweb world of scholastics, said Bacon.

The second great aspect of the Enlightenment was its reverence for the testimony of nature. Because it was nature, newly measurable through scientific instruments as the telescope and the microscope, which afforded the raw materials upon which reason would operate. In nature, diligent experimenters would discover the real order of things, not the artificial one invented by Aristotle and the logic textbooks.

Isaac Newton, one of the most gifted mathematicians of his age and probably of subsequent ages, relentlessly reduced the motions of physical bodies to the laws of attraction at a distance, or gravity. John Locke, with equal relentlessness, reduced the human mind to a passive receiver of sensations from the body. And Charles de Montesquieu, turning to politics and society, found government shaped not according to a single model handed down from heaven on a platter; but by the individual histories, events, accidents, preferences and religions of each nation. Nature came first, then analysis.

This is often why people so often concludes that the enemy of the Enlightenment was religion. In Italy, the Catholic Church tried to silence Galileo; while in England Newton had to keep his own very unorthodox religious opinions very much to himself. Locke was even indicted for heresy. But the Enlightenment thought that its real enemy was skepticism, by which I mean the attitude that nothing can be known for sure about anything.

Skepticism was no small threat in the 1600’s. Beginning in 1521, protestant Europe and catholic Europe commenced a bloodbath of religious warfare, which lasted until 1648. Despite each side’s claim to be representing the truth of God, both catholics and protestants had to settle at the treaty of Westphalia, for no better result than an exhausted agreement to leave each other alone. Not surprisingly, more than a few Europeans decided that if you couldn’t be sure whether God was a catholic or a protestant, then there was no reason to be sure of anything.

Men do not recognize the natural informity of the mind, complained the French skeptic Michel de Montaigne, it does nothing but search, contriving and entangling in its own work. This skepticism, much more than any malevolent church court, threatened all hope of reaching a real understanding of why catholics and protestants behaved the way they did; and why the universe followed the pattern it did.

Scholastic logic had worked for so many centuries because it assumed the validity of its own foundations, starting with certain accepted truths and arranging them in patterns that supported its conclusions. But both science and religious wars made that foundation unstable. So, the greatest work of the Enlightenment had to be done at the very beginning by showing that something could be known at all. That was the work that fell to Rene Descartes.

A New Foundation for Knowledge

The contribution of Descartes was to show how something could be known with certainty. The method he devised for this was unlike the scholastics’: to begin with doubt. One could, said Descartes, doubt everything; or almost everything, since the one thing that you could not doubt was the fact that you were doubting. Cogito, ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. From that single certainty Descartes worked back to certainty about God, about existence and so forth. What we have to bear in mind is that the way Descartes walked from doubt to certainty still indisputably led back to God and Christianity. That was what made Descartes and the Cartesian method so appealing to Harvard, which by the 1680’s did not enjoy much stability or certainty.

In 1654, President Dunster announced that he had gone full length into separatism and adopted the views of Baptists, who were a group within English Puritanism who repudiated the baptism of children altogether. Dunster resigned the presidency of Harvard under pressure from the Massachusetts General Court.

The finances of the college were just as unstable. Even with the income of John Harvard’s legacy and the contributions from the Massachusetts’ treasury, the entire budget of Harvard amounted to no more than 250 pounds per year. From there, matters got only worse. Dunster was followed in the presidency by a clergyman, Charles Chauncy; Leonard Hoar, and another clergyman, Urian Oakes. A succession of weak presidents that were so unprepared to run the college that the “ungoverned youths” of Harvard drove one of them nearly to suicide.

Finally, 1684 Harvard got its first real star President: Increase Mather, the pastor of the old church in Boston and the most famous minister of Boston in New England’s second generation. It was Mather who successfully solved the problem of royal threat to assert direct control of Harvard. He also obtained the right of the Massachusetts General Court to set the college up as an independent corporation. It was Mather who brought to Harvard two of the most influential teachers: John Leverett and William Brattle.

Brattle is the embodiment of the cautious Enlightenment. The logic textbook Brattle wrote in 1687: “A Compendium of Logic According to the Modern Philosophy”, is the first Cartesian logic work produced in America. It adopts the Cartesian tactic of starting from doubt. Again, starting not from authority as with the traditional scholastic philosophy; rather, Bratlle began with doubt and from doubt working to attain certainty. But plainly, the purpose Brattle had in view was to undercut skepticism, not to call into question truth itself. What he wanted to do was to dig a new epistemological foundation for Calvinist orthodoxy.

To doubt of things and suppose them to be all false, only for the obtaining of more full and direct knowledge, is a laudable method. That was the view of Brattle. Because doubt, he said, was what showed the way to prove a truth and demonstrate it to others.

He was careful to limit the application of the Cartesian method to philosophical questions, not theological ones, in a manner similar to that of William Ames. And like Ames, he considered that unbelief was not a fault of theology, but grew instead out of the perverted will of the skeptic. This is very much a cautious approach and embracement of Enlightenment thinking.

The New Philosophy in Harvard

John Leverett, on the other hand, seemed not to have use for caution at all. Born to the habits of the New England’ merchant aristocracy, the grand son of an early governor, a layman and eventually representative in the Massachusetts General Court; Leverett assumed the presidency of Harvard in 1708. Leverett was not a particularly great thinker, but he was a great admirer of Descartes and the new philosophy. Even more significantly, he discouraged Calvinist dogmatism in favor of what he called “more generous principles”. Leverett would, in other words, talk more about virtue than about redemption. He put his entire support behind the organization of a new church in Boston, who’s manifesto in 1699 proclaimed the church congregational, not by reason of scripture, but by the light of nature.

Too late, old Increase Mather tried to block Leverett’s ascension to Harvard’s presidency. Even when the game was lost, Mather’s precocious son, Cotton Mather, mounted his own campaign against Leverett. He was wasting his time. Eventually, with some bitterness, the Mathers realized that Harvard had become an outpost of these “generous principles” rather than Calvinistic ones.

When the unhappy Calvinist congregation and ministers decided that Leverett had gone too far into Cartesian method and the new philosophy, organized a new college of their own in New Haven, with the generosity of another wealthy patron of learning: Elihu Yale.

Continues in: The Enlightenment in America

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The Influence of Separatism Over Harvard and the First Generation of Americans

One place where the mix of separatist inclination and traditional establishment was dramatically highlighted was a across the Charles river from Boston, in the town of Cambridge, where in 1636, a college was founded and named after its first major benefactor: John Harvard. Harvard was not a college similar to what we might think of colleges now. The universities of Europe still moved in the 1600’s in the circle established by scholastic theology in the Middle Ages, which is to say that the chief tool of learning was logic, not the laboratory experiment. The principal source of truth was authority, not nature. The principal language was Latin, with the principal authority being Aristotle.

17th century thinkers aspired to the creation of a summary of all knowledge. A framework that William Ames, the greatest of English Puritan academics, called tecnologia, which would, they hoped, perfect the whole man. They emphasized chiefly what we today would call classical learning. The six arts of logic, theology, grammar, rhetoric, mathematics and physics. They included virtually nothing that we would call professional of vocational studies, including nothing that we might call practical.

The Art of Argumentation

Logic was the art of discoursing well. It concentrated on the arrangement of arguments in sharp-like fashion from the general to the specific. An arrangement which would assure victory in argument and a full exploration of the terms of the argument. That explains why the New Englanders were so intent on college-building so quickly. The culture of Puritanism was built upon logical argument. It was built on the exposition of Biblical texts. Calvinism itself was very much an exercise in the arrangement of logical and interrelated theological axioms. To preach well was a department of discoursing well, so you needed an institution which trained people in discoursing well.

Puritan preaching, in fact, developed a rigorous methodology that was patterned after university logic, in which the preacher was expected to follow a stated three-part formulae. First would come the doctrine: a particular biblical verse or biblical verses would be read out and then they would be taken apart, term by term, for the exposition of every possible meaning. The next part of the sermon would be the uses: those various meanings would be reassembled in a series of linked and persuasive theological propositions. Then the preacher would turn to the application. These applications or uses would be turned into a series of practical, everyday rules for living or self examination, or maybe just for pious mediation.

Pious meditation. It was on that last point that a question was bound to be presented. If the purpose of Harvard college was the raising of a ministry who could pose practical questions, who could create an atmosphere of pious meditation, then why was that the education that fitted them for this was based on what everybody admitted to be an education in pagan classical authors: Aristotle, Cicero and so forth.

Using the Ancient Pagans and the Source of Knowledge

Medieval universities had coped with this by asserting that the study of these pagans could be redeemed by understanding that God actually used them to announce the truth, or that the truths that pagans articulated had somehow been borrowed from the Bible. Or that all truth is God’s truth, even if that are the pagans that discovered it first. But if Protestantism was supposed to involve a comprehensive renovation of Christianity, then it was going to be difficult to stop that renovation short of questioning such rationalizations. That questioning settled principally on two issues, the logic curriculum and the structure of human psychology.

Logic, in both the medieval and Protestant uses of the term, referred to both the origins of knowledge (epistemology, how we know things), and the arrangement of that knowledge to yield truth statements or axioms. The Puritans were realists, which is to say that they understood that the senses convey real information about the world around us. The measure of one’s intellectual insight laid in how one arranged the data one encountered into orderly relationship. This order was an entirely logical one, not an experimental one. But it did assume that there was order in the nature of things, imposed by the God who created things. Discerning that order was very much a matter of getting propositions about God and nature that illuminated the inner essence of things and the hidden will and plan of God.

Unfortunately for the aspiring Harvardian in the 17th century, protestant scholastic textbooks all united in offering different ways of arranging these propositions about God and nature. The question for the pious New England student turned on who’s system yielded the more theologically orthodox protestant conclusions. On that point there was very little agreement.

William Ames, representing the more radical approach to intellectual system building, was critical of using the ancients as the foundation for moral reason. For instance, Ames believed that ethics should not stand as an independent study on its own, with its teachings hammered out by logical connections between moral axioms. Ames believed that ethics should be studied only as a department of theology, which is a shorthand way of saying that there was no moral truth or theory of moral truth worth studying apart from Calvinistic Protestant Christianity. The highest kind of life for a human being, wrote Ames, is that which approaches most closely the living and life-giving God. So, any attempt to study ethics, apart from what God had revealed about the topic, was pointless. Why go to Aristotle? Why go to Cicero? God’s revelation of this truth in the Bible was the only material from which to lift a logical system of moral philosophy.

Ames was skeptical that the classical pagans could convey moral truth purely by the efforts of unassisted reason. Ames did not object to the notion that knowledge was the fruit of logic, that it resulted from linking correct propositions to correct propositions; but he was unconvinced that ethics could be based on the same data or the same premises as natural philosophy. This had direct implications for the study of human psychology (although the scholastics had no idea of the social science discipline called psychology). I’m saying this precisely because ethics, according to Ames, could not be rightly understood as a function of unassisted reason. This is the way scholastics understood human physique.

Human Nature and Belief in God

From the very beginnings of European universities in the 1100’s, the inner life of human beings had been pictured as a series of faculties: will, understanding, judgement and so for. Right reason was dependent on adequate comprehension of how these faculties operate. There was, unhappily, no consensus on how the faculties were to be appropriately arranged. The greatest of the scholastics, Thomas Aquinas, was an intellectualist, which is to say that he believed the intellect to be the queen of the faculties.

A number of important protestants, including Calvin, agreed. But there was also one tradition in medieval thought, going all the way back to Augustine, which found human behavior too much unpredictable to be the result of the governing intellect. Instead, these Voluntarists, including Ames, gave to the will the place of greatest power. True Christian faith, wrote Ames, has a place in the understanding, but it cannot be received without genuine turning of the will towards God. Belief involved understanding, but understanding alone did not define belief. The will, said Ames, must be moved and rechartered to embrace the good.

Harvard Curriculum and the New Structure of Society

The Harvard curriculum swayed steadily between the competing demands of these theories. And with good reason. Intellectualism implied one sort of relationship between Church and society, and Voluntarism implied a very different one. A church order like the one in England could claim the allegiance of all the people of Massachusetts if what was necessary was only an intellectual ascent to theological propositions. If what Massachusetts Bay wanted most was the creation of a somewhat modified, somewhat more pious and purified version of the Church of England; such an intellectual ascent was all that was needed to induct everyone in that society into the church. So, it only made sense to teach at Harvard that the intellect was indeed the queen of the faculties.

But if, as Ames insisted, it was the will the true queen; then God could be served by nothing less than the full conscious embrace of those propositions as an active love. And that only by divine grace. If the voluntarists were right, then the corresponding notion of the church and society had to be that of the separatists, who denied admission to the church to all but those who could made a conscious willing profession of divine grace.

Of course, to embrace voluntarism meant surrendering the pretence that Puritanism was only about rehabilitating the Church of England. It meant revolutionizing any basis for establishing a puritanized version of a national church in Massachusetts. But if that happened, then Massachusetts’ society would become completely detached from the Church, it would, even worse, become exactly the sort of pagan society described by the classical authorities that the Puritans were so suspicious about.

The Harvard curriculum, at first, shifted uncomfortably in the shadow of William Ames. Ames, who died in the Netherlands in 1633 as yet another Puritan exile from English religious oppression, was the most dearly loved of all Puritan theologians. The high personal standing he enjoyed in the Puritan churches made it difficult to keep Ames from being put at the center of the Harvard curriculum.

The founders of Harvard were of Puritan beliefs by conviction and of scholastic tradition by habit. And habit meant that Ethics should be taught at Harvard as a stand-apart subject, starting with Aristotle. And Massachusetts went on its way, trying to think of itself as an integrated Christian society, just as in the Middle Ages it had been. The problem was that between 1630 and 1660 subtly it became much harder to keep the old intellectual habits at Harvard. Part of this arose from an unpleasant and unanticipated development in the history of New England. The Puritans had children who did not necessarily wanted to be Puritans, or not at least in the way their parents had been. It was the first instance of what would be a common experience among immigrants to the New World.

Separationism and the New Generation

The generation born in America enjoyed all the blessings of the environment that the immigrant generation had helped to build in America and probably took them for granted. At worst, it actually experienced a sense of embarrassment among the enthusiasm and sacrifices that brought their parents to leave the old country in the first place.

In this case, a new generation was born in New England which felt none of the urgency of piety that took their parents to abandon England for the New World. And far worst than merely feeling embarrassed, the new generation found itself entangled in a web which their parents had spun as they thought for their own good and for the greater glory of God.

What New England’s second generation discovered was the downside of the separatist impulse to exclude all but the gracious from the church. They had never known the oppression of the crown. With that, they lacked the passion and determination to find grace in their own souls. Since grace, and not birth, was what qualified New Englanders for membership in the churches, the separatist impulse in Puritanism left them on the outside of the churches starring in. As it did so, the claim of Massachusetts to be a godly society began to weaken. After all, how can a society consider itself godly when its children are outside the discipline of the church and cannot confess enough faith to join it.

Linked to that challenge from inside, was a second challenge from the outside. By 1687, the English government finely reached out to impose control over Massachusetts’ affairs. Revoking the original Massachusetts Bay Company charter, introducing Church of England worship into Boston, and even restructuring Harvard. There was yet a third challenge to the godly New England by the 1680’s. This came from entirely intellectual rather than political sources. That was a spectacular revolution in thought, called the Enlightenment.

This article is part of the series on American Puritanism

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